Casein Palette

This picture shows my working setup for painting in casein. On the left side are small 1 ounce jars containing premixed paint of casein medium and pigment that I’ve made myself. Each one is labeled with the pigments I use most often, and I’ve glued a small color swatch on them so I can easily spot the colors I reach for. The small squeeze bottle holds casein medium that I’ve also mixed up.

Painting Palette

My “palette” is on the right side. It’s just a scrap piece of white plastic, roughly 6 x 8 inches, where I place my dabs of paint. The mixing plate is a 12 inch pizza pan. You may notice plastic wrap covering the pan and the palette. That’s Glad’s “Press-N-Seal” plastic wrap. It sticks on one side to just about anything, and the other side has a non-stick pebbled surface.

I had been using the pan as a direct mixing surface for a long time before evolving into this plastic wrap system. I used to dab out my paint on the outer rim, much as I do on a wooden palette when oil painting. Typically I dip into the paint dabs for fresh paint with a palette knife or rubber tipped shaper, and mix it on the pan. The mixed paint ranges from dark to light values with different color tones on the outside of it, all blending together. The mixed area will move to an empty spot when I switch to a different base color, such as a red shirt to green grass or whatever.

I found that as my mixing area grew it often contaminated my paint dabs, which annoyed me, especially if I was using a wet wash mixture. One particular aspect of casein paint is that it dries rather quickly. It can be re-wetted with water or medium, but that just dilutes the dried paint. I’ve tried “wet palettes” sold for acrylic paint, but they made the paint too watery. Watercolor palettes with their small compartments I found too awkward to use. Instead of liquifying the dried casein, I prefer adding more fresh paint. Physically separating the palette from the mixing area made the mixing process and adding more paint easier for me.

With the wrap, clean up is very simple. Just peel it and throw away, or clean and reuse. The paint mixes on this surface rather well when it’s wet, and it’s not slippery like other plastic wraps. I can save the peeled off wrap to record what paints were used in the last session. The palette holds about 12 colors which is plenty for me in one sitting, and I can get about 4 – 5 rows before tossing it. The 12 inch pan has enough space for about 3 different mixing areas, or can be wiped clean with a wet rag. If I’d like something other than the gray color of the pan to mix on, I can place white or colored paper under the wrap.

As for the medium, I squirt that into a small watercolor tin, and use as needed. Slightly less than a tablespoon of medium will last for several hours.

Painting Layout: Chinese Restaurant

This is an old pencil sketch (roughly 8.5 x 11″) that I made while waiting for appetizers to arrive. The restaurant was in San Francisco, Noe Valley I think, but can’t recall the name. The color test was made digitally later that evening using the Painter program. It’s finally time to make a painting of it.

Pencil Sketch

Color Test

I think now it needs more “weight” space on the bottom. I may either pull back the “camera” view or lower it slightly when I transfer it.

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Chinese Restaurant Painting Finished

Essay: What Would Michelangelo Say?

Michelangelo

Creating art at a high degree of quality is not an easy thing to do, nor should it be. From my point of view, it is a great challenge. Like a professional athlete who practices everyday, I do not expect to walk on the field and perform at a high level without paying my dues on a regular basis. My most embarrassing moments have come from knowing I could have done better, but (for whatever excuse) I left the failure on the canvas anyway. They are like wounds that won’t heal. If you cannot be certain of your own evaluation, you might imagine some great artist of the past whom you particularly admire were looking down at what you’ve just done. For example, what would Michelangelo say?

To be honest, I’m not sure I would want to know his opinion. The measure he would use to evaluate my work would be based on what he thought was great, which would probably just his own stuff. Art has changed very much since then. By that I don’t mean the “anything goes” principle that Modernism allows, but just the strict application of technique and format that he developed, following his own education. I would not discount the work of artists of a different style that came after him as having any less value, although he might. I have no interest in copying the work of someone like Michelangelo, but I do expect it to stand on its own merit. Any art I make should be the best I could have done. The scope of my artwork is also on a much smaller scale, but that doesn’t mean I give my efforts any less attention.

If Michelangelo were in my studio, I’d sit him down and say, “Mike, take a look at these art history books, get yourself caught up on what passes these days as Important, and then we’ll talk.” I suspect that, once he got over the impact of seeing a printed page, he’d get about as far as the 18^th century and toss the books away in disgust. Can’t say I blame him. So, what exactly would he say? (I’m actually asking you, since I don’t have a clue.) I can certainly imagine it would be a most spirited declaration, but I expect that there would be only so much of it I could apply to my own artistic pursuits. Could Michelangelo appreciate the paintings of, say, Edward Hopper to the same degree that I do? Would he want to go back to being dead?

I could try to conjure up a few other ghosts, some more contemporary to at least within the last 100 years or so. There would be several for whom it would pay off tremendously, just because so little is accurately known about how they worked or what they thought about things, but in the end a guy’s got to trust his own judgement. Every artist that we accept as Great, we do so only by consensus of other critics and historians, if not by our own eyes. While it’s certainly important to read their essays on why they have reached such conclusions, they are in the end just someone else’s point of view. Is that what quality is? Fashion? I certainly hope not.

Ultimately, I settle on my own ideals. I’ve made a point to be well read and broad minded in terms of accepting what passes as great in the art world these days, but I still have my own standards. I live in this world so I feel I must adapt to it to some degree, despite my best efforts to the contrary. It can’t be avoided. I become inspired each day to make something out of nothing, and how accurately I can match that motivation or personal vision is the gauge I use to measure quality. It’s a personal goal.

Rainy Streetcorner: final

This painting is almost finished now. There are a few spots here and there that need to be cleaned up. Once again, it’s 12 x 9 inches, casein on panel.

Rainy Streetcorner

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Read the previous post in this series:

Rainy Streetcorner Painting, Part 1

Testing Polyester Fabric

These are four fabric samples I recently ordered from Rose Brand, a theatrical supply company. In clockwise order are shown heavyweight cotton muslin, and three different colors of 100% polyester swatches, all about 5 x 9”. Polyester is a more permanent fabric than natural fibers like cotton and more dimensionally stable, but I wanted to test them for painting and how well they adhere to wood. Hopefully there’s enough material here.

The first adhesive I tried was PVA on bare plywood (birch.) That wasn’t very successful. Even at full strength, it easily pulled right off. Hide glue or starch paste didn’t work any better, but I expected that. I also tried some acid-free rubber cement, Best-Test White Rubber, which held okay at first, but easily peeled away once it got wet. (To be fair, this glue is mainly designed for paper.) Another glue I had on hand was a double-sided sheet of mounting tape made by Therm-O-Web, which I’ve used in the past for gluing Mylar. It made an extremely good bond at first, but also peeled off easily once it got wet. The last thing I tested was acrylic medium, Golden’s Soft-Gel (gloss,) which held about as strong as the mounting tape after drying for a few hours, and it’s waterproof.

Polyester on Wood

The paint medium I wanted to test first was casein, since that’s been my main medium of choice lately. Fortunately, casein seems to adhere just fine to the polyester. The wet washes go down well and even appear to bleed. It behaves just like natural raw canvas. Acrylic paint also sticks well, either wet or thickly applied. For testing oil paint I used two rather oily brands I had on hand, Sennelier vermilion and Lefranc red ochre. No problems as far as the paint adhesion is concerned, but the solvent (mineral spirits) I thinned them with was even worse on the mounting tape than water. Solvent only slightly weakened the gel at first, but it was fine once the solvent evaporated. So the gel seems to be the winning glue; although, the tape would be okay if I painted the fabric first and then glued it to a board afterwards. Of course, this fabric can also be stretched on a frame, and not glued at all, but I think I would want a heavier weight fabric for that.

Acrylic primer adheres well to the polyester. I used Golden’s Acrylic “Gesso” and had no problems. Linseed oil or solvent won’t damage polyester, so there’s no real reason to prime it for oils other than to make it less porous. I would recommend sizing the wood first if you’re using oils and not priming, since the acid in wood might otherwise stain the surface. Personally, I feel that if I’m going to prime the surface then it doesn’t much matter what sort of fabric I use. The main appeal to me for using polyester was not having to make any extra preparations. There’s another vinyl adhesive, called BEVA 371, that might be an improvement also, since it’s reversible, unlike gel or mounting tape, which are permanent.

Rainy Streetcorner

Here’s a new casein painting I’m starting, 12 x 9″. It’s based on a few sketches made while sitting at an outdoor cafe up in Montreal a few years back. The first image shows the initial line drawing with a gray tone wash, and then some complementary color added. I’ve applied an isolation coat of shellac to this and it’s ready for finishing.

Drawing transfer

Underpainting

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Rainy Streetcorner Painting, Final

Making Large Printouts with Photoshop

I can only make prints up to 8.5 x 11 inches, so if I’m going to transfer a digital drawing to a larger size for a painting, the multiple prints will have to be taped together. I thought I’d share my procedure for doing this for the benefit of those you that may be new to the process.

When I’m making a digital drawing, I typically set the image resolution at actual print size (inches.) My pixel-per-inch resolution is usually set at a minimum of 300, since smaller settings can make the lines harder to see clearly. Common monitor resolution is 72 ppi.

Under the View setting in Photoshop, display the Grid, turn on Snap, and Snap to grid. Edit the Grid Preferences where the gridlines are every 8 inches and subdivisions are 4.

Make a selection that is 4 squares across and five down, which will be 8 x 10 inches. Copy this selection to the clipboard, make a new document, and paste your selection.

Select all of this layer, and Stroke the selection. A width of 1 pixel is usually okay for the print with the line location on the inside. You can also alter the line color if you want, which will help you separate it from the rest of the drawing. I sometimes make the stroke in a new layer unto itself, and remove every part of that rectangle except for the four corners, creating a small right-angle mark which is all I need to line up the prints. To do that quickly, select the four corners, invert your selection, and then delete. Now you can print your image.

Return to your original drawing and make another selection adjacent to the previous one, being sure to snap to your grid settings. Make another document, paste, stroke, and print it.

I use a lightbox to see through the printed sheets of paper, and match up the stroked corner lines, but if it’s daylight outside you can hold them up to a windowpane, and then tape them together.

Finished Street Corner Painting

Here’s the final version of the “Street Corner” painting. Casein, 12 x 9 inches.

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Read the previous post in this series:

Street Corner painting Part 1

Oil Pastel, Crayon, Casein Adhesion Tests

This procedure is based on one recommended to me by a technician at Golden Paints for testing adhesion. It’s not a perfect test, but it can still give you a good idea how well layers of different mediums adhere to each other.

As an example of this I wanted to test the combination of casein medium and wax crayon or oil pastel layering I spoke of a few days ago. The crayons were drawn on top of watercolor paper. In one area I drew different colors of crayon separated with layers of casein. In another area I drew crayon without any casein at all.

Tape on Wax

I took some thick sticky cellophane tape and pressed a small square over the area to be tested, burnishing it down firmly. I then cut three lines: two parallel to each other, and one connecting them. I made sure the knife cut all the way through the paper. Next, I peeled back the cut section to see how much of the medium came off on the tape. According to the technician at Golden, if no medium comes off you have excellent adhesion, if a small amount comes off adhesion is satisfactory but not ideal, and if the tape removes quite a bit of material then adhesion is not very good.

Wax and Casein

Wax only

On the test that contained wax and casein, some flakes of crayon came off, but a majority of it remained. This means the casein was adhering well to the wax, but the wax adhesion to casein was only satisfactory. A test on the crayon alone showed hardly any flakes coming off. That could be that the tape just wasn’t sticking very well to the wax, although it did appear to do so.

Continuing on, I also wanted to test oil pastel and casein adhesion. As with the crayons, I had two areas on watercolor paper, one with three layers of casein between different colors of oil pastel, and another area with pastel only. I placed tape over them, sliced them and peeled the tape back. In the image below you can see the two pieces of tape. The one on the left is oil pastel and casein, the one on the right is pastel only.

O.P. with Casein

O.P. only

You can see that quite a bit of oil pastel and casein lifted off with the tape. That’s not too surprising since in the other image you can see the oil pastel that had no casein also lifted off to a large degree. I know from experience that oil pastel has fairly weak adhesion. Typically they have very little oil in them, which is where most of the adhesion comes from. Different brands are not all made of the same ingredients, however, so the results may vary. These are the Pentel “Arts” brand.

My conclusion with these test is that casein binds satisfactorily to wax crayon and oil pastel. In the case of the pastels, casein doesn’t improve things too much. It might actually help as long as the casein doesn’t loose adhesion over time, so some long term tests are required to be certain.

Casein Painting: Street Corner

Here’s a continuation of the previous post on Transfer Paper, showing the first layer of casein paint applied in neutral complementary hues on hardboard. It’s based on a frame of old video shot in San Francisco many years ago, somewhere near Chinatown as I recall. This is about half a day’s work. Tomorrow I’ll start the final color layer.

I think I like this “Aquabord” surface. It handles like watercolor paper, but heavy use of water won’t hurt it. That’s good for washes like this.

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Read the next post in this series:

Street Corner painting Final

Homemade Transfer Paper

On my website, I have written an article about how to make your own transfer paper, and here I’m showing the process in action as I prepare a new small (9×12”) painting. Transfer paper is like carbon paper placed between a drawing and a blank surface, and drawing on it transfers the lines to the surface below. Instead of buying some, you can make your own in any color you wish using true pigment instead of graphite. The paper can be reused as is several times, as well as recoated with more pigment.

In this image you can see a sheet of vellum tracing paper coated with a wash of gray pigment mixed with turpentine into a thin paint-like paste. I placed a sheet of paper under it so you could see it better. The mixture should be thin enough to brush on, but not so thin that it won’t transfer clearly. If it’s too thick it won’t adhere very well. Test how it transfers on a scrap sheet of paper. It dries very quickly, usually within 15 minutes or so. Use caution since some pigments can be toxic, and proper studio ventilation is required when using turpentine.

The pigment I’m using here is a ceramic stain I picked up at a local sculpture supply store. I wanted a light gray so the lines wouldn’t be too dark. You could also try grinding down soft pastels, although, you need a good bit of pigment, and the pastel binder may not allow it to transfer very well. Raw pigment works great.

Here you can see the lightly transferred lines. The surface support is an Ampersand “Aquabord” I’m trying out, which is a hardboard coated with a special acrylic primer that feels similar to watercolor paper. I drew the transferred lines with a colored pencil so I could see where I had previously drawn. I went back over some spots with a gray watercolor pencil, lightened some other lines with a kneaded eraser, and fixed it with a coat of spray fixative. Now it’s ready for the first coat of paint.

Color Simple

Have you ever watched the film “Little Big Man” with Dustin Hoffman? There’s a scene where his character’s sister teaches him how to be a gunslinger. She tells him to go “snake-eyes,” because squinting will help him hit his target more easily. As it so happens, a similar squinting technique is often taught to artists in order to blur their vision and simplify what they see before them. It makes it easier to render a complicated image if you reduce it down to simplified forms and values. There’s a process we can use digitally in Photoshop to recreate that effect, which some painters may find useful.

In the above image you can see the original photograph on the left, and two processed versions showing varying details. These were created within Photoshop using multiple layer effects, indexed colors to reduce the color information, and filter effects to simplify the image.

Here’s how the image was processed:
1. Duplicate the image in Photoshop to make a copy, and activate Image:Mode:Indexed Color….
2. In the “Palette” options select Local (Perceptual) so you can adjust the number of colors manually. In this case I entered 24 colors, Forced = None, Dither = None.
3. Select All of this image, copy and paste that reduced color image into your original to create a new layer.
4. Create a new adjustment layer in the stack for Hue/Saturation, and slide the Saturation level to –100.
5. Create an empty layer and fill it with a color. I chose a sort of Burnt Sienna. Change its Layer property to Overlay.
6. Duplicate that color layer and set it back to Normal, and change its opacity to about 35% or so.
7. Duplicate this whole image again as a copy and flatten it. Now from your filters choose Paint Daubs under the Artistic effects. Turn off Sharpness and reduce the brush size to whatever level you’re happy with. I used 4 here. Smaller numbers leave more detail.
8. Select All of this image, and then copy and paste it back into the top of your layer stack.

These steps were used to create Version 1 above. I noticed a few spots where I lost too much detail in a couple faces and that blue area in the center, so I went back to the original photo selecting just those areas, and repeated steps 1-3 above (this is the “indexed2” layer in the image below.) I duplicated the result, and deleted the previous Paint Daubs layer from that duplicate. Flattened the layers, and reapplied the Paint Daubs filter again. All these extra steps aren’t usually necessary, but it shows how you can tweak things more to your liking.

Indexed Color reduces the color depth of the digital image from 24 to 8 bits, which decreases the number of colors used and simplifies the shapes; although, it also treats shades of a color as different colors. The purpose of the Hue/Saturation layer is to eliminate the color information to just shades of gray. The color Overlay layer gives me an overall tone that I can use for an under-painting guide, and the opacity layer shortens the value range so my lights are duller and darks are brighter, which makes paint handling easier later on. It could be any color or shade of gray, but a mid-range value works best. Using the Paint Daubs filter is a good way to smooth out the dithered details.